Sep 21-23 -- London & Harogate

Sep 21 – London


We got off to a slow start today, neither of us in a big hurry to get moving (well, as usual, I was more in a rush than Sandy – not rushing anywhere in particular, you understand, just being me). Today’s breakfast was dry cereal with coffee and juice for Sandy that we had picked up the previous evening.

Mid morning we headed out to the tube, to Picadilly Circus to find tickets for an evening show. There were many choices but we agreed on “We Will Rock You” – a musical featuring the music of Queen. We then walked to Covent Garden and shopped for a bit but I was getting tired and hungry. Sandy had eaten her breakfast quite a bit after me -- she was not hungry yet – so we walked over to Totenham Road to find our theatre for the evening. It was right across from the tube station, easy to find, so – that accomplished – we found a local pub for lunch.

Being a pub, beer of course is the usual drink. Sandy only wanted a small beer so I asked the bartender how small the beer could come – his response was “how small ??” – “yes, my wife only wants a small beer” – “here in the UK mate the beer comes in pints and half-pints” – well, that answered that question ! So with a pint and a half-pint we also each ordered a variation on the ploughman’s lunch, which purported to have bread, cheese, ham and chutney. Well, the ploughman’s lunch came – the two were similar, with a thick chunk of pork pie, one with a tub of butter (at least 1/3 pound) and the other with a ½ pound piece of goat cheese, both with a small baguette, and both with a piece of cheddar that was at least, at least 1 pound.

I’ve never eaten so much cheese in one sitting. One ploughman’s lunch would have satisfied both of us … I ate the goat cheese and about half of the cheddar. Sandy ate half of her cheddar and a taste of the goat cheese. We both ate our bread and chutney. We both ate the pork out of the pie and some of the crust. This lunch was so filling that we did not eat again until 11pm – after the show – more on that later.

After lunch we walked, eventually ended up at a tube station and went back to our hotel. The original plan was to have an early dinner, but as I mentioned, neither of us could eat. I left the hotel about ½ hour before Sandy and went to the internet café. Sandy picked me up there and we left for the theatre.

What a blast. Literally. We were in row D – the 4th row – there were 21 very large speakers pointed right at us. This was the music from Queen – all you had to do was sit there and you were getting CPR from the bass out of the speakers. In the US you could sue after the show for hearing loss … but it was great. I was hit with a pang of regret though that we were leaving London the next day and had only taken in one show … oh well … we did and are about to do other things this trip. The place rocked with the Bohemian Rapsody encore – they’d been tantalizing us with it all night.

After the show we tubed back to South Kensington and found an italian restaurant, had our obligatory bottle of red wine with pasta and were back at the hotel a little after midnight. Yes, DT out and awake after midnight … think of it as 7pm EDT. However, we had to leave early in the morning so it was going to be a short night.

Saturday dawned early for us and we were out of the hotel before 6:30 a.m. heading for the tube and Kings Cross train station. We got there early – in fact we could have caught the 7:10 train but we had reservations on the 8:10. We found some breakfast – for Sandy an almond croissant and for me a small baguette sandwich. We were hoping for a more substantial breakfast but Kings Cross was more into prepackaged.

… and we’re off to Leeds. I’m getting smart, composing this into Word to paste into a blog later. How later will depend on access.


Well, days have past. We are now in Amsterdam so I’m faced with the task of remembering everything that we did in Leeds.

We arrived in Leeds on Schedule at 10:30 a.m. and Allan was waiting, as promised, wearing his Australian hat that he received for his 70th birthday. We went back to the house to meet Christine and shortly thereafter Eric arrived. Eric is Allan’s older brother – 77 – Allan is 73. Harry, older still, is something like 81. Harry also lives in the Liverpool area where Eric lives but he has health problems right now – blind in one eye and restricted vision in the other, and his wife is not well … so we did not see Harry.

The five of us set out for lunch and had a driving tour of Harogate where Eric lives. In Harogate we had an excellent lunch at Betty’s – a local institution NOT named after the founder, believe it or not. We had to run the gauntlet of pastries in their shop before sitting down to lunch. This was not easy because we were in queue for about 20 minutes.

After lunch we went over to the local Royal Horticultural Society gardens and made our way through them. We then headed back to Allan & Christine’s to meet with Helen, Mark and their three children (Helen is their daughter). Oh – in actual fact Christine went home early to get supper ready then came back to pick us up.

We feasted at dinner – roast pork, a baked salmon pie, veggies, 2 deserts – typical for the eating that we did over the two days.


Yesterday we left the house at 9am to undertake our roles as Marshals in the 10k run organized by Up and Running – a local sports store – in benefit of the Harogate Theatre restoration fund. We dashed around in the car for an hour and a half handing out high-vis bibs to the Marshals (Allan was the organizer of the Marshals) at each of the stations and then took our stations. Allan had arranged that we would be on a stretch where the runners only passed once, so we were through in an hour or so -–there were walkers too !

Then … lunch back at their house, off to Ripley Castle for a tour. The castle has been in the family for 700 years and the current Baron (or Earl, I forget) lives there with his family in a part of the castle. The tour was informative and entertaining … then we walked through the gardens. Afterwards it was back to Allan’s house where Sandy and Christine (who was feeling a bit under the weather) waited while Allan, Eric and I went to 6pm mass. We then went to the Boars Head Bistro for a yet again excellent dinner.


Monday … time to leave, and early. We left the house at 5am to go to Leeds Bradford airport and fly to Amsterdam. I’ll cover Amsterdam in another blog …